Barbarous Taste

For this project, we consider Bourdieu's statement that:

"In conferring upon photography a guarantee of realism, society is merely confirming itself in the the tautological certainty that an image of the real which is true to its representation of objectivity is really objective."

We are asked to explain what we think it means, and whether we agree with it; if not why not.

The notes on Bourdieu's essay (Bourdieu, 1990) are included in my post: The Social Definition of Photography in which some of the concepts below are explained in more detail.

There are three background factors to analyzing and understanding this statement:

• The statement and essay are extracted from Bourdieu's book Photography: a Middlebrow Art (1990) which sets out to understand the role of photography in a wider sociological context; why do people indulge in the medium, and why, specifically, does it appear that photography is a pursuit of the working classes;
• The section in which the quote appears is entitled 'art which imitates art'. This is an important clue as Bourdieu's thesis that photography is 'different'; it, along with cinema and jazz as other examples are pursuits that are within the 'sphere of the legitimizable, they are not 'consecrated arts' like sculpture or literature;
• The quote itself is at the end of a paragraph that is tortuously long-winded but in essence argues that there is a social conformity to the place of photography within society 

Although there is no emphasis on Bourdieu's original, I think the important words in the phrase are guarantee of realism (indeed there is a slightly different slant one can take by making heavy emphasis on "guarantee"). His argument is that if society believes in the objectivity of photography because it is (and can be no more than) a reproduction of reality, then of course a photographic image is objective - it has to be because society defines that it can offer no more than that simple aim; artistic norms decree that photography does not belong in the higher echelons of consecrated art.

It is a seductive argument, and, ironically, itself almost a tautological necessity of Bourdieu's broader argument about the place of photography within the cultural arena. If you believe photography is a second class artistic pursuit - it imitates rather than is art - then you are led to it being no more than a reproduction of reality, and consequently it must be objective; to think otherwise is to accept that photography can indeed 'rise above' the mundane reproduction of reality and be more than an imitator (as Bourdieu himself believes).

There is resonance here with the arguments of Scruton (1984) that photography is not true art, discussed in a previous blog entry:

"If one finds a photograph beautiful, it is because one finds something beautiful in its subject. A painting, on the other had, may be beautiful, even when it represents an ugly thing".

By implying that photography for all its lack of credentials as art can demonstrate a beautiful subject, Scruton does accept the objectivity of the medium as the default. But, as argued in my previous blog, photography is more than reproduction, because the author chooses his or her position, time of day, lighting, exposure, aperture value, perspective, framing, and many other subjective decisions.

In conclusion, I agree with Bourdieu's assertion within the confines of his own argument but think that we have moved on from thinking that photography does "guarantee realism", thus rendering the quote somewhat devoid of contemporary relevance.

References:

Bourdieu (1990) Photography: a Middlebrow Art (Polity Press) pp73-98

Scruton (1984) The Aesthetic Understanding (London, Methuen) cited in Howells and Negreiros (2012) Visual Culture. Revised 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press